A Baroque Pavanne

16) The dance is the mother of all languages. -- R.G. Collingwood

17) The way people move is their autobiography in motion. -- Gerry Spence

18) Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays.-- George Balanchine

19) Dancers are the athletes of God. -- Albert Einstein

20) No sane man will dance. -- Cicero

21) Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music. -- George Carlin (and others; original authorship not known)

22)Dance with all the might of your body, and all the fire of your soul, in order that you may shake all melancholy out of your liver; and you need not restrain yourself with the apprehension that any lady will have the least fear that the violence of your movements will ever shake anything out of your brains. -- Lola Montez, "Hints to Gentlemen or the Art of Fascinating" (1858)

23) When you dance, you don't sweat: you glow. -- Didi

24) Music is an invisible dance, as dancing is silent music. -- Anonymous

25) If the dance is right, there shouldn't be a single superfluous movement. -- Fred Astaire

26) Dance like no one is watching you. -- Anonymous

27) Lightness of movement is the cardinal demand one has to make on a dancer. -- Frank Thiess

28) All dancing girls are nineteen years old. -- Japanese proverb

29) The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself. -- George Balanchine

30 Whenever you dance remember you should feel as though you are in love with your partner, even if you have just met him. -- Megata Tsunumi

31) Everyone has seen people dancing all night. But take a man and make him dance for a quarter of an hour without music and see if he can bear it. -- Maurice de Saxe

32) After I stopped dancing, I was unable to listen to beautiful music. -- Suzanne Farrell

33) How inimitably graceful children are before they learn to dance. -- S.T. Coleridge

34) Never criticize your dance partner. -- Brave Combo

35) The dance is an appearance; if you like, an apparition. It springs from what the dancers do, yet it is something else. In watching a dance, you do not see what is physically before you – people running around or twisting their bodies; what you see is a display of interacting forces by which the dance seems to be lifted, driven, drawn, closed, or attenuated… The forces we seem to perceive most directly and convincingly are created for our perception; and they exist only for it. -- Susanne Langer

If you don't have time to watch the whole "Pas de Deux" video, drag the bar about 2/3 of the way and see McLaren's rendering of the fourth dimension of dance.

36) What does it mean to express one’s ideas of some inward of “subjective” process? It means to make an outward image of this inward process, for oneself and others to see; that is, to give the subjective events an objective symbol. Every work of art is such an image, whether it be a dance, a statue, a picture, a piece of music, or a work of poetry. -- Susanne Langer

The International tango is like the end of the marriage, when you're staying together for the sake of the children.

-- Barbara Garvey

"Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that it can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still further away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch, stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored... Every language in this way a specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages." -- R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art

41) GEORGE WASHINGTON ON DANCE

"Alas! our dancing days are no more." George Washington on the Value of Dance

I thought that visitors to this site might like to see a poignant expression of George Washington's love of dance. In a letter dated Nov 12, 1799, to the Assembly in Alexandria, declining their invitation to be a member of the club, he says:

"Alas! our dancing days are no more. We wish, however, all those who have a relish for so agreeable and innocent an amusement all the pleasure the season will afford them. . . ."